New TPM Column on the Next Phase of Education Reform
I’ve been thinking a lot about how education reform will be changing with the shifting political and pedagogical winds, so I put down a few thoughts in :
We spend tons of time building systems to build procedures and protocols around important decisions. Sometimes they’re designed to prevent superintendents from using聽聽to build football stadiums. Sometimes they’re aimed at incentivizing teachers to set certain priorities or instruct a particular way.聽The challenges of fixing schools and classrooms is generally tackled by means of systems. This is a serious challenge for the No Child Left Behind-era of American education reform, which generally seeks to collect more data on schools and use it to apply consequences to poor-performers. While the education reform movement is hardly monolithic, most reformers are enthusiastic systems-builders. There are good reasons for this 鈥 for instance,聽聽鈥 but the approach has serious limitations.